


Where the Rainbow Ends

by moontyrant



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Biblical Reinterpretation, Biblical Themes (Abrahamic Religions), Human Hijinks, The Great Flood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-07-31 15:13:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20117152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: During the Great Flood, Noah and his family were the only ones spared.





	Where the Rainbow Ends

Noah studied Aziraphale for a long moment with hard eyes. He stared at Aziraphale's eyes, so blue as to be otherworldly, to the white wings stretched out behind him, to his sandalled feet, dirty from miles and miles of traveling. In the dark workshop, light radiated off Aziraphale in waves, shining off falling dust motes disturbed by micro air-currents stirred from his wings.

“I could show you my true form if you like,” he said after a long moment. He plucked awkwardly at his snowy white raiment.

Noah waved him off with a grunt. “No need.” He dropped into a chair, knees popping. He was an old man; he felt every single one of his years and in the stark light Aziraphale cast he looked them too. “A great flood? Wiping out all of humanity?”

“Not all of it!” Aziraphale balked, his voice a bit too high. Noah gestured for him to lower his voice; in the next room over Naamah stirred in her sleep. Aziraphale continued, his voice lower but it sounded weaker too. “You and your wife and children will be spared. The righteous will survive.” Weaker, still. “It's divine mercy.”

“And everyone else is supposed to die,” Noah finished. His shoulders slumped. “My neighbors, my friends, everyone is going to die in the coming disaster?”

“Yes.” What else could he say?

Noah chewed that over. “I mean, fair's fair, they're not angels by any means.” He gestured at Aziraphale as if to say and _you should know_. “In my life I've broken bread with some real bastards, but I wouldn't wish them to-to _drown_.” His eyes widened. “Their wives and children too? Even the little ones who haven't had the opportunity to do more than toddle from here to there? And all the oxen? All the crops what they've poured their tears blood and sweat into raising? Their homes, some of which I helped them to build?”

Noah was not the first or the last man to see true divine grief. It was not a good look. Aziraphale shuffled his wings the way one might wring their hands, and the light in the cramped workshop dimmed. “Yes.”

Noah blew out a breath. “Why me?”

“You were handpicked by the Almighty. It is not our place to question the ineffable workings of the Great Plan. This is your gift and your burden.”

Noah scrubbed his work roughened hands over his face. “Just me and my family are supposed to make it through this?”

“Yes.”

Noah's mouth wobbled. He jumped up and walked around his workshop, restless hands reaching out to touch the tools on his work bench, half a dozen projects in various states of completion, reaching out as if to say good bye. He paused with his back to Aziraphale, eyes fixed on a door in want of mending. “You mentioned a boat,” he said, voice hoarse.

“Yes, the Ark. I have specifications.”

“No time like the present I suppose.” He half turned, rolling his shoulders . “I'll get to work immediately.” He marched through the door with renewed determination, the angel trailing in his wake.

“Immediately? It's the middle of the night!”

“How could I sleep with the Apocalypse on its way? Come along, Aziraphale-- Heaven knows I could use the light.”

  


When Crowley got to town, he had to see the fuck off big boat for himself. The earth was parched, cracked and trodden, but black clouds gathered in the east and the air felt heavy with divine wrath. Even after all these years, the smell of it made his hands shake. A fallen angel knows freedom that other angels never could: once the worst has happened to you, everything else is thrown into perspective. But he did not like to be reminded of the event.

A small crowd of people had also amassed to look at the Ark. Some of them jeered at the workmen putting their finishing touches on it. Some of them eyed the animals gathered in pairs to board the boat with hungry eyes, and Crowley could almost hear them doing the complex mental calculus of there's-good-eating-on-an-ostrich and how-do-I-catch-it-without-being-kicked-to-death. But what caught his eye was the flash of white, a raiment that could only stay clean with divine intervention. He sidled up to his adversary.

“There's going to be a Great Flood,” Aziraphale explained in an undertone. “The Almighty is a bit...tetchy.”

Crowley felt like the words were filtering to him through cold treacle. An apocalypse—everyone in the area drowned by God's own hand, save for Noah and his family, and the paired animals slowly lumbering onto the gangplank. Aziraphale stared at the Ark, gleaming and new, but Crowley stared at the gathered crowd.

“Even the kids?”

“Everyone.”

Not for the first time, a black rage swelled up in Crowley's breast, cold and breath taking, like falling through thin ice into the lake below, and only got colder when the first rain drop hit him in the eye like a warning shot.

It wasn't terribly difficult to get on the Ark—he slithered on with the other snakes and got comfortable with the animals. Aziraphale slipped inside as well; no point in staying out there much longer. Granted, the poor bastards getting rained on could use an angelic influence more than anyone else right now, but Crowley got one good look at Aziraphale's face and held his tongue. He could go back out there and spread some serious mischief: even regular rain tried people's virtue to the breaking point, never mind a diluvian flood*. But that would mean bearing witness to that human suffering, watching a thousand candle lights snuffed out one by one. It would mean being rained on, and being left truly alone in a world that was more dead bodies than alive bodies. Hard pass.

*It would not, technically, be an antediluvian flood for very long.

Crowley settled for coiling his long black body up nice and tight and pretending he wasn't bloody furious. Furious at his own impotence, furious that the only insight to heaven was just as helpless as him. Furious that he was furious, because he shouldn't care what God does with Her playthings. Nothing to do but wait.

And Aziraphale leaned against the wall by a window, arms crossed tightly over his chest, staring out at the premature dusk with a frown. He had that constipated look on his face, like there was some kind of mischief going on but he didn't know how to address it without getting all smitey. “It's very curious,” he said after some time, apropos of nothing.

Crowley lifted his head up and flicked his tongue, annoyed. The rain was really falling now. He could feel the air pressure dropping, and the temperature sinking in sympathy. Thunder rolled, loud enough to make his ear drums rattle. The rain dashed itself against the roof and walls outside, the wind sleeting the rain sideways.

“What?” Crowley snapped when it became clear Aziraphale was not going to elaborate.

Aziraphale ran his hand absentmindedly over the head of a nearby sheep, eyes still fixed on the window. “Is it just me, or does Noah have a big family?”

Crowley gaped. Of all the things to think about. “What?” he demanded again.

“It's just...he only has one wife.”

“So? It'sssss normal to only have one wife. Can't expect him to ssssupport more than one wife.” He had only seen Noah in passing, but he didn't exactly strike Crowley as a cattle tycoon. The guy was a carpenter and ran a modest subsistence farm. Not exactly a multiple wives kind of lifestyle, that.

“Yes, I know. So how does he have forty sons and thirty-two daughters? And all of them have spouses, and most of them have children. To say nothing of Noah's siblings, and his aunts and uncles and cousins.”

Now that he mentioned it, Crowley did notice the interior of the Ark was noisier than he anticipated. He cast his thoughts and his tongue outward. Quite a few people, very few of them especially righteous. Realization dawned. “Is Noah a righteous man?”

“I should say so. The Almighty selected him by name to survive, _because_ he is righteous.”

Crowley didn't blink*. He slunk off the straw bale and pulled himself up to the windowsill. Outside, in the rising water a small flotilla of makeshift rafts drew up to the Ark. Shem dropped the gangplank and started pulling bedraggled survivors into the welcome dry of the Ark.

*He would have normally, but snakes are famously lacking in the eyelid department.

“The rains sent by God will baptize the world anew,” Aziraphale intoned, voice soft. Reverent.

The world shifted. The Ark shuddered and shifted, buoyed by the rain. Someone in the sanctuary screamed, and someone else laughed, and a great many voices chattered over the pound of rain and thunder. Down below, Shem swept a weeping toddler into his arms and carried her inside.

“It's a miracle,” Crowley said weakly.

“There's going to be something called a 'rain-bow,' a promise to never flood the Earth again.”

“It's a bloody miracle without Her help,” Crowley marveled.

“The wicked aren't being purged.” Another raft bumped against the gangplank; Crowley could read them as easily as he might read a clay tablet, each one of them a bastard to his core, all of them clutching each other to keep each of their number from taking a fatal tumble into the brackish water. Before Crowley's eyes Shem pulled them into shelter, clapping each one on the shoulder like they weren't liars, cheaters, and thieves, and sopping wet besides. Shem's foot skidded on the edge of the gangplank and two bastards steadied him, yelling over the squall to be careful. “They're being redeemed,” Aziraphale whispered.

“That's--” Crowley scrabbled for the right words. Safely inside, the gangplank raised against the tide, only a demon and an angel watched the makeshift rafts dash themselves into splinters against the Ark and swirl away as so much flotsam. “That's _blasphemy_.”

“Divine mercy.”

“They're just going to do whatever they want?” Crowley could hear his voice getting shriller but he couldn't seem to stop himself. “They're just going to spit in Her eye and _do what they want_?” There is chutzpah, and then there is _chutzpah._

“They're doing what they think is right.”

“That's anarchy!”

“Compassion.”

At the same time, they both caught the other's eye. “Humanity,” they laughed.

  


The main body of the Ark wasn't for animals. It was a wide open area with high ceilings where the people congregated to wait out the Flood. Crowley did not count them, but at a rough estimate he guessed there might be two-hundred now, with more arriving every hour in groups of three or four or five. Children played. Women gossiped over makeshift cooking stoves and darning. Men gossiped over the animals that had spilled into this part of the boat, wrangling them or grooming them or feeding them. But what caught Crowley's eye was that they were doing it together. The rain had erased status. It had washed away wealth, walls, all the things that make people believe they are small instead of limitless. What grudge could withstand the destruction of one's home?

Outside the storm raged. Inside, yellow lamplight tended the remnants of the city. A young man ran a comb through his little sister's damp hair while she sang a nonsense song of her own making. An old woman gestured hugely while she told a fantastic lie, and her audience cackled and jeered, and she grinned and lied harder than ever. A youth chased after a goat with a look of pure panic, a look that only got wilder when the goat remembered it was a goat, turned around, and charged at him, aiming for the soft bits.

So many people in such close quarters would tend to get on each other's nerves. Not to mention, lice, bedbugs, disease*. It was a demon's ideal work environment; Crowley could get used to this.

*No sooner than Crowley had the thought than a family of lice took up residence on his scalp and gifted him their eggs. He'd had to go to Hell and sit in a pool of boiling sulfur for three days straight to get rid of them.

“Not on your life, fiend,” Aziraphale tutted without heat, as if reading his mind. He passed a wine skin to Crowley, who reverted to his human shape to take it. He drank deeply. Aziraphale watched the commotion happening around them, eyes soft. “In the wake of Her wrath comes Her ineffable mercy, and all sins are forgiven.”

Crowley screwed the lid back on the wine skin and passed it back to Aziraphale. “Nah,” he decided after a moment's consideration. “Humans are just devious bastards.”

**Author's Note:**

> Noah: Yes and here is my huge extended family.  
Aziraphale: Are you actually related to anyone here?  
Noah: What are you, a cop? Mind your own business, weather boy.


End file.
